Chapter 1
Non Omnis Moriar*

This is an old story I'm moving over from another account. It's a very different story from what I would write now, but I felt it should be included here, perhaps reworked a bit in places. Enjoy!

The world was bathed in fire.

Bathed, scrubbed, swallowed. The fire was like a mist, expanding to fill the space it occupied. It found its way into every crack in the sideboards, every thread of the once-rich clothing in the dresser, every hidden trinket, every treasured memoir - the flames touched them all, consumed them. They were nothingness, slowly crumbling to ash, paper dissolving before Emme's eyes with glowing ember edges.

And the smoke! It was testament to how bright the fire was, that you could see it through the smoke. That was a mist, and Emme inhaled it in short, scared breaths as she ran desperately, trying to find a way out that didn't exist; and she felt the smoke press against her lungs, not enough room even in there to contain it. She felt like she would burst from the pressure, and she hoped she would. Anything would be better than burning alive.

"Help! Help-" she coughed, but her voice was barely above a whisper.

There was no one to hear her, anyway, not for miles. No one but whoever had set the fire, and they were long gone. Come to rob the clinic, and burn the evidence when they left. It meant she had no medical supplies to treat herself with, no water to even try to fight the fire. She wished they had slit her throat while she slept, rather than let her wake up to her bedsheets set ablaze.

She banged on the heavy locked door to her bedroom, rasping for help from no one. Though she knew it was red-hot, it was maybe her only chance: she tried the handle. She seared her hand and fell to her knees, clutching it. The heat on her skin, the smell of burning flesh, her own screaming, were lost in fire and smoke. She stood again, tears flowing freely down her cheeks but more determined than ever. She had felt what it was like to burn now, and she would not die that way. It did not end here, not like this.

Taking a running start, she threw herself against the door that was at least twice her weight. Bouncing off ineffectually, she tried it again, and again. Her nightdress caught fire, and though she felt the burn, the pain, somewhere in her mind, she was too far gone to stop. All her adrenaline, her strength, her being, was focused on one simple task. She was going to break down that door if it killed her.

And it nearly did. Emme was cloaked in flame, wildly crashing against a solid door that was designed not to budge. Then the door frame, groaning and shrieking, ripped itself from the wall around it, splintering plaster, dislodging the very foundations of the house, which shifted ominously in protest. It brought the door crashing to the ground with it, and Emme dove through. The ceiling followed the door frame, the entire clinic beginning to collapse around her.

She tore off what remained of her flaming nightgown, favoring life over modesty. But there was someone else in the clinic: she'd had a patient, heavily dosed with med-x and not due to wake up until several hours. She would have to drag him out. The odds pointed to him still being in the room at the back.

Great beams were falling from the ceiling, the ceiling of the clinic Emme had built with her mother when she was only seven. The place she had always called home, even before then when there was nothing here but a shack made from scavenged tin. They crashed about her, and through the smoke and flame and darkness of midnight, it was nearly impossible to predict where they'd land. Emme couldn't try to guess, she just had to dodge and pray. She wouldn't leave behind her patient.

But as she burst through the open door, she knew something was wrong. The patient, a man in his thirties who she knew had a wife and two children, had his eyes wide open. Yet he wasn't running, wasn't moving, wasn't panicking as he should be. Then, in a flash of flame and sparks as a beam fell from the ceiling, she saw the warm, sticky red flow from a long slit across his neck. Emme, a skilled surgeon, blanched and was almost sick; but she was brought back to reality when a beam fell behind her. It nearly trapped her, and it would have had she not sidestepped at the last minute in the right direction, away from the man who had died under her care.

She took nothing with her as she fled from her home. There was nothing to take. It was all ash and twisted metal. So she ran, and she couldn't have told how long she ran. Naked in the Mojave desert, so thoroughly covered in soot that you could only see her skin where her tears had made dirty trails in her face, she passed geckos and mantises and coyotes. Some ignored her, some chased her a while, but none had the wild incentive she had to run, run as fast as she could, in any direction. They fell behind eventually, and soon Emme had only the moon and the stars and the faint trail of smoke on the horizon for company - and even when that was gone, she didn't slow up.

It was a rock that stopped her; a small, irksome pebble, no bigger perhaps than her fingernail. In her bare feet, she stepped on it, those same bare feet that had sprinted over everything from glass to ground cacti, that had been torn bloody and bare without her noticing, and it was a pebble that felled her. When she did fall, that was when she stopped, that was where she stayed. She waited for something to come along and kill her.

But nothing did. It was almost insulting, like she wasn't worth the wasteland's time anymore. As though she'd died in that fire. How would she know, really? She was so black with soot she could very well be a walking pillar of ash, ready to crumble at any moment. The wasteland creatures might be averse to eating her because she would taste bad, like a charred brahmin steak dropped into the fire by accident.

It seemed impossible after all that fire, but she was shivering cold. Or it could have been the shock. Since nothing seemed interested in killing her in the immediate future, she dragged herself to her feet. She couldn't run anymore, not the way she had before. But she trudged on, hoping to find some clothing before she found people. Or more fiends. On second thought, maybe she should hope to find a weapon first.

There. A tin shack on the horizon, as much scraped together as her home had been when she was very young. There were no lights on, but that didn't mean no one was home. Emme was really and truly cold now, and she hurried as much as she could on her torn feet. If someone was home, she would have to hope they would take pity on her, and that they wouldn't be a fiend or some kind of threat.

No one was home. It seemed miraculous, but the one-room shack was empty when she opened the unlocked door. Emme would never know, but it's owner was Carlyle St. Clair, and that very night he had been kidnapped by a man named Mortimer and his associates, who were planning to eat him. But those are affairs for another story.

She glanced around. It was an empty, minimalistic sort of house, one double-bed, a stove, a fridge, a shelf, and a single table and chair that faced the wall rather depressingly. There wasn't a lot of insulation, being a tin shack and all, so there were ragged mats thrown about on the floor and one or two on the wall to keep the heat in. Emme found a switch, which lit a bare lightbulb hanging by a wire and a bracket from the ceiling. Electricity. That was interesting, for an abandoned house. If it ran off of a fission battery, the owner couldn't have been gone for long.

She was considering this because she really didn't want to be here when the owner got back. Trespassing in someone's house, with all of these fiends everywhere was a dangerous thing to do. People tended to shoot first and ask questions later. But fission battery or not, Emme wasn't leaving this house without some clothes to wear. So she poked around. It didn't take long to find them. There were two closed boxes in the house, one on the shelf, which contained old photographs, and one under the bed. This contained what she was looking for. Most of the clothes didn't look like they would fit, and there weren't many clothes. Emme made do with an off-white shirt that looked like a dress on her. She rolled up the sleeves so her hands were free, and pulled on a pair of brahmin-skin suspenders that were also a bit big. She adjusted the straps, tucked the shirt into the suspenders, and rolled up the pant legs.

She bit her lip, trying not to think about her old clothes. She'd had so many. She'd had so much of everything. Books of every kind, posters that hung on her wall. Drawings, photographs of her family, of her life. Every bit of evidence that she had ever existed. She had grown up in that one spot. Her parents had settled down there and raised her. When her father had died, her mother had built that house with Emme, and Emme had lived there now for more than a decade. And it had all been destroyed in one night - for what? The few hits of hydro and med-x she kept stored in her medicine cabinet? She hadn't had time to catalogue what had been stolen, if anything, but there were few other reasons to attack a medical clinic. Nineteen years of life and home were up in flames for a few indulgences to some zealous fiends.

She shook those kinds of thoughts out of her head before they made her lose it completely.

So she had clothes, and that was a definite plus. But as she'd noted before, a weapon was infinitely more important. There was a laser weapon, and probably enough energy cells to last Emme to...wherever she went next. But it was one thing to snitch some clothes because you were naked, it was another thing to steal a man's weapon. Emme had always thought of herself as kind of a good person, helping people get better. Good people weren't thieves. This weapon was quite possibly the only way whoever lived here was able to defend himself. Surely she couldn't take that away from him? But she'd let a patient die today, and everything she'd ever known and worked for had been burnt to the ground.

She took the gun.

The double bed was tempting, but she couldn't stay, not now she had stolen a gun. She tore some of the rags on the floor and wrapped them around her feet like socks and slipped on a too-big pair of grimy boots by the door. She wasn't cold now, with clothes and the sun just beginning to peek over the horizon. But she stepped out of that door and realized she had nowhere left to go, and that sent a chill up her spine.

Emme was always kind to everyone who passed through her clinic. Polite, understanding, generous. But it meant she didn't often make friends. Her kindness had a distance to it. And the few people she had ever really bonded with had long since left the Mojave, usually headed west to more stable NCR territory. She wondered if she should head there.

But another memory forced its way into her mind, a memory of a person she had never, in fact, bonded with. Someone she had been polite and distantly kind to. Frank Weathers had been carried into her clinic by some NCR soldier who'd paid her ten caps and left the man there, on the couch in her waiting room. Her services were much more than that, but the NCR man hadn't bothered to ask, so she figured he wouldn't be interested in paying it anyway. Not for a man he didn't even know. Frank Weathers had met with the biting end of a gecko, wandering through the desert a few miles south of her clinic. He had bite marks and bruises, and he looked like he'd been running for days. He was parched and malnourished. Emme had set about preparing to stitch him up, getting out the supplies and readying the med-x so he wouldn't be conscious while she did it. But he'd grabbed her arm, in such a daze his eyes couldn't quite focus on her.

"Wife," he'd said softly, and Emme didn't even know if he was talking to her. "My kids."

Emme had nodded reassuringly.

"It's all right, Mr. Weathers." Emme had said. "You'll be fine. I'll get you back to your wife and kids. How many do you have?"

Polite. Understanding. Kind.

"Two," he'd whispered. "Two kids. I have to find them, I have to find them!"

He'd started to panic, and Emme knew she would have trouble restraining the injured man if it came to it. Not without making his injuries worse.

"Shh," she'd calmed. "Where did you last see them?"

"On the road out of Nipton. I don't know if they got away." He'd tried to stand. "Please, I have to go - "

That was when she'd injected him with med-x, and he'd fallen back onto the cot. There had been no other choice, and at the time, she'd thought she could let him go after his family once he woke. She'd stitched him up and applied stimpacks here and there, but by the early hours of the morning he was dead, throat slit and body burned to ash in a fire.

How would his family ever know? Would there be any trace of a man left in that ruin? Would they even know he had come to her clinic, or that the charred heap that stood there had once been a clinic? She doubted that NCR soldier would point them in the right direction if they came investigating, or care that the man had a family. A wife and two kids. Damn.

Nipton was a long way from here, and that family could be anywhere by now. But still, she had let a patient die under her care. That had never happened to her before. Not in surgery, not in an attack. But it had happened today. Emme felt like the world was ending, or at least her world was. She didn't have her home, or her books, or her treasured pictures of her family. The clothes she wore didn't belong to her, and neither did the gun in her hand. She wasn't even a doctor anymore, not without any patients. Or medical supplies. If an injured person were to walk up to her right now, she wouldn't have even a needle and thread to stitch them up with. She had nothing now. So if this family was in Nipton or if they were on the other side of the country, it wasn't like she was doing anything else.

She headed southwest as the sun rose and the temperature started to climb. She didn't have water, so she walked in the shade of the mountains whenever possible. She avoided people at all costs. A figure moving on the horizon was an enemy, no matter what. She didn't want to risk trusting the wrong person, even if she was only trusting them not to shoot her as she walked by.

She had heard stories about Nipton, too, and wasn't sure she really wanted to go there. It sounded like the kind of place her mother would have died before letting her go. The men who passed through the clinic sometimes talked about adventures there, always with a wild laugh at the end. But she wasn't going for a laugh, she was going to try and track down a family. Surely her mother would have approved of that.

She walked for miles and miles, beginning to feel just how badly she had damaged her feet. The sun was high in the sky, about noon. How long had she been awake? What time had the flames reached her bedsheet, ripping her from her dreams and sending her hurtling face-first into the reality of a burning room and no way out?

She needed water. She'd needed water hours ago, she'd needed water from the second she'd inhaled two lungfuls of black smoke. And now she'd been walking in the desert sun for at least eight hours. Maybe more.

There was a gas station up ahead, one of the Poseidon energy company ones. She doubted it would have water, at least, not purified water. But it might have something, and she was willing to try anything. Sunset sarsaparilla or murky, irradiated water; months old brahmin milk or even some beer. Anything to quench this thirst, to clear the dust from the back of her throat.

She approached it cautiously. Her mother had gone with her on a run once or twice, when business was slow and they couldn't buy the supplies they needed. She knew a few things about how to survive in the wasteland. Rule number one was don't trust people, which Emme was doing beautifully. But rule number two was don't trust a building, because it will often contain people. She was breaking that rule because she had to, but the building looked abandoned to her. No one had been there in days, you could tell that by the heavy layer of dust and dirt in front of the door, kicked up by the dust devils that spun to life every now and then. So she wasn't too cautious when she opened the door and peered inside.

It was dark, and through the outside light that shone in, she could see that the light fixture on the ceiling was smashed. Definitely no electricity in this one. She flung the door all the way open, so that the sun would cast as much light on the room in front of her as possible. But it was only one doorway, and the sunlight cast stark shadows. Anything could be lurking in those shadows. Emme shook her head, telling herself she was being silly. That might have been an acceptable fear when she was a little girl, but now she was on her own without a single thing to really call hers; she had to grow up if she was going to survive, if she was going to find the Weathers family and tell them that Frank was dead.

There was a shelf full of crusty Blamco Mac n' Cheese, which she hated, but she was hungry. She grabbed one and pawed her way along one of the darker shelves, looking for a drink. Mostly just empty tin cans met her fingers. There was a third aisle, and she slid her hand across it. Cleared out. That was odd, considering there had been a pretty good supply of maceroni in the first aisle, but the other two contained nothing. Usually if someone cleared out a store, they took everything, if only to sell it. She went to check behind the counter.

As she rounded the corner, she met the barrel of a gun staring up at her from the ground. Crouched behind the counter, hiding, was a figure she could only see bits of, where the sun fell on him. Enough to see he was wearing a uniform. Enough to see he was wearing the wrong uniform, for this side of the Mojave. A ragged, torn red tunic with armor overtop, tied together with leather straps. Crimson red crosses on the metal shoulderguards. A Legionary.

For some reason, Emme wasn't afraid. It had something to do with being in a fire, she guessed. She wasn't sure if she felt invincible, or like she was dead already, or if there was a difference between the two feelings. All she knew was that she wasn't afraid, wasn't even particularly bothered by the gun barrel staring her down. In fact, there was a faint shimmer of fear in the Legionary's eyes. Everything she had ever heard about Legionaries had been dark and foreboding. They were feared on the battlefield, and no one laughed heartily or conspiratorially when they talked about Legion like they did when they talked about Nipton. No one even smiled when they talked about Legion. Yet through the dim light filtering in from the doorway, she could see his eyes wide, a slight tremor to his lip.

This was where all the food had gone. The Legionary had dragged it all behind the counter with him where he could reach it easily, all except for the maceroni. And she knew she wasn't wrong about the dirt in front of the door. Something told her the Legionary hadn't moved in days. Then she spotted seven small bottles of water by his feet, irradiated or not, she didn't care. After a few seconds of waiting, Emme spoke.

"If you're going to shoot me, shoot me. Otherwise, I'm going to take one of those bottles of water behind you."

The Legionary didn't speak, just looked more scared, and he made no move to lower his gun. But Emme had had enough of waiting around, so she gently pushed it out of the way just enough to lean over and take a water. The Legionary moved his legs, like he was afraid she would hurt them.

That was when she saw the swelling around his left ankle. It was bad, and several days old, all black and blue and yellow and red with crusted blood around the edges. She was a doctor, and without even thinking about it, she began carefully examining the leg, holding it steady.

She'd forgotten to take the Legionary's reaction into account. He yanked his leg away and shoved the gun right in her face, trying to back away but unable to do so effectively without hurting his ankle.

"Get out of here, profligate," he growled. "You can take the water, but then get out. Get out or I'll shoot you."

Emme held out her hands, not in a gesture of surrender, up in the air, but out in front of her, trying to calm him down. And for some reason, it wasn't because he held a gun in his hands. It was probably dehydration at work, but she didn't really absorb the fact that she could be shot, wasn't factoring it into her actions. When the Legionary had moved his leg, he'd winced, biting back a cry of pain: that was what made her want to calm him. He was making his injury worse by overreacting.

"You do what you think you have to do," Emme said, referring to his threat to shoot her, "and I'll do what I think I have to do."

The Legionary looked confused. He had moved into the light when she tried to examine his leg, so she could see the full range of his facial expressions. His lip was trembling a bit, sure, but he was biting down hard on it to keep from doing so. His eyes were wide, but they didn't flinch away from her, or dart around looking for an escape. He had shaggy brown hair just starting to grow out from a short military cut that clung to his face and head, drenched in sweat, and his eyes were a deep, warm green, like a forest. He was young, no more than a few years older than she. Emme reached for the injured ankle again, explaining so he wouldn't pull away.

"I'm a doctor. I'm going to fix your leg, if I can. If you held still it would make this much easier."

He pulled back anyway, scraping his injured ankle along the splintering wooden floor.

"Why the hell would you do that?" he spat at her. "Profligate whore."

Emme didn't even blink.

"If you feel so strongly about it," she said simply, "then shoot me. Otherwise, let me do my job."

The Legionary watched her like a hawk, but when she reached again, he didn't shrink away. It looked as though it were more painful for him to stay than to try and escape.

"I won't pay you."

Emme just ignored that. When you were a doctor, you always got your money first. Once people were all stitched up and ready to go, they didn't have as much incentive to give up their caps. If she'd wanted anything from the Legionary, she'd have asked right off the bat.

The ankle was broken, and it had begun to heal the wrong way. It would have to be re-broken. It wasn't something she liked to do, even with large amounts of med-x to dull the pain, and she didn't even have that. But it had to be done or this man would never walk right again. She stood, searching the gas station for something she hadn't thought to look for before: medical supplies. In a small, one-person bathroom, there was a first aid kit. But it didn't hold any med-x. There was a bandage, a wrist brace, and a stimpack. She took the stimpack, since it was better than nothing.

The Legionary hadn't moved. He couldn't. And he had never stopped pointing that gun at her. But something told her that if he was going to shoot her, he would have already. She kneeled down by where he was sitting and braced herself.

"You're brave, aren't you?" she addressed, noting the wide but unflinching eyes, the biting down on his trembling lip, the squaring of his shoulders. He didn't reply. "This is going to hurt, but know I'm not attacking you. Alright?"

"What are - ?"

Emme wanted to take him by surprise, get the nasty ordeal over with quickly, before he could build up a dread for it. He cried aloud as Emme put all of her force into re-breaking what little had healed of his bone. But again she'd forgotten the gun. Even if the Legionary hadn't felt threatened, hadn't wanted to shoot her already, the muscle reactions alone would have caused anyone to seize up, to convulse around the trigger, even firing the weapon by accident.

It was by no accident that the Legionary fired repeatedly at Emme's chest.

*'Non omnis moriar' means 'not all of me shall die' or 'I shall not wholly die.'